coginitive thinking error

I believe a lot of things – and trust my senses, which are not always reliable sources of accurate information. I believe that what I perceive IS what IS. Yet, I occasionally make sensual, judgmental, and thinking errors – optical illusions, incorrectly heard communications, biases and prejudices, and etc.

Sometimes what SEEMS to be is not what it SEEMS to be.

It SEEMS to me that I’m sensing a lot of “what is” – rocks, houses, my glasses, the sound of the truck outside my office, and etc. — “WHAT is that?” I ask. “SomeTHING, that’s WHAT!” I answer.

To get beyond the First-Second Degree bubble, I could ASK a question that elicits more questions – particularly those that question the question. While at the edge of the bubble, answering questions tends to serve to satisfy my need to know – delivering me back into the First-Second Degree safety bubble.

As I begin to question my trust in my senses, thinking, and beliefs, let’s investigate the relationship between WHAT and HOW in my world of perception…

Patterns – it’s the stuff of life. I don’t perceive reality – I literally create it with assumptions – based on my perception of patterns. I assume a pattern as soon as I “guess” that one exists. After that, I tend to “fill in the blanks” rather than test my hypothesis (my “guess”).

To illustrate my point, consider the following:

1, 2, 3…

Can you predict the next number? Of course you can. You assume it is 4. That’s because you perceive a familiar pattern. But, what if it is not 4. What if it is 5 instead? Is the pattern broken? Maybe – unless you can perceive a new pattern, you will not be able to predict the next or the next number.

Bias: “prejudice in favor of or against one thing, person, or group compared with another, usually in a way considered to be unfair.” (Google)

Prejudice: “preconceived opinion that is not based on reason or actual experience.” (Google)

As a human being, I’m proud to say I have biases and prejudices. They separate me from the machines I live with. My coffee pot doesn’t care what color I am or how old I am or who I associate with. It brews the same pot of coffee regardless.

Biases and prejudices become dangerous when they spin out of control and threaten others. By allowing a bias to go unchecked or unacknowledged, I develop a perceptual filter – a blind spot – that blinds me to the harm I may be doing. Fed by this positive feedback loop of prejudice and perceptual filters of justification, unacknowledged societal biases can result in terrifying outcomes like genocide.

About Bias and Prejudice

Perhaps bias and prejudice have evolved to serve some useful purpose – to some degree and in certain contexts. My “preference” for long pants in the winter, for example, serves me in that context by keeping me warmer. It also satisfies my personal and unreasonable prejudice about pants and dresses. The prejudice seems to be based on context – it’s cold, so wear long pants – and yet it is unreasonable because in MY world view, women wear dresses, even when it’s cold. I don’t ever consider men wearing anything other than pants… hot or cold Why not? Prejudice!

Perhaps being AWARE of and acknowledging bias and prejudice is ALWAYS useful, although the experience can be subjective. That is where education can be helpful.

Knowing and accepting that I have biases and prejudices helps me monitor and control them. This helps me communicate more effectively, make sounder choices, respond more appropriately, and live with far less stress.

Admitting my biases helps me take charge of them. In taking charge of my biases I take charge of my life. Further, in understanding my biases and how they work I become a more useful and stress-free member of my society.

In this article, I have copied liberally from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. As you read the list of cognitive biases below, along with their variants, I hope you, too, will find some value. Maybe you’ll notice some biases you didn’t know you had.

Remember: knowing you have biases helps you take charge of them. Understanding how your biases work helps you understand yourself and others better. This understanding can serve you and your community in a number of ways.

30 Cognitive Biases

Bandwagon effect – the tendency to do (or believe) things because many other people do (or believe) the same.

Bias blind spot – the tendency not to compensate for one’s own cognitive biases.

Choice-supportive bias – Choice-supportive bias – the tendency to justify one’s past choices with positive attributes that may or may not have existed at the time the choice was made.

Confirmation bias – the tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions.

Congruence bias – the tendency to test hypotheses exclusively through direct testing, in contrast to tests of possible alternative hypotheses.

Contrast effect – the enhancement or diminishment of a weight or other measurement when compared with recently observed contrasting object.

Deformation professionnelle – the tendency to look at things according to the conventions of one’s own profession, forgetting any broader point of view.

Disconfirmation bias – the tendency for people to extend critical scrutiny to information which contradicts their prior beliefs and uncritically accept information that is congruent with their prior beliefs.

Endowment effect – the tendency to place a higher value on objects one owns relative to objects they do not.

Fundamental attribution error is the tendency for people to over-emphasize personality-based explanations for behaviors observed in others while under-emphasizing the role and power of situational influences on the same behavior.

Focusing effect – prediction bias occurring when people place too much importance on one aspect of an event; causes error in accurately predicting the utility of a future outcome.

Hyperbolic discounting – the tendency for people to have a stronger preference for more immediate payoffs relative to later payoffs, the closer to the present both payoffs are.

Hindsight bias, sometimes called the “I-knew-it-all-along” effect, is the inclination to see past events as being predictable.

Illusion of control – the tendency for human beings to believe they can control or at least influence outcomes that they clearly cannot.

Impact bias – the tendency for people to overestimate the length or the intensity of the impact of future feeling states.

Information bias – a distorted evaluation of information. An example of information bias is believing that the more information that can be acquired to make a decision, the better, even if that extra information is irrelevant for the decision.

Loss aversion – the tendency for people strongly to prefer avoiding losses than acquiring gains. Some studies suggest that losses are as much as twice as psychologically powerful as gains.

Neglect of probability – the tendency to completely disregard probability when making a decision under uncertainty.

Mere exposure effect – the tendency for people to express undue liking for things merely because they are familiar with them.

Omission bias – The tendency to judge harmful actions as worse, or less moral, than equally harmful omissions (inactions).

Outcome bias – the tendency to judge a past decision by incorporating presently available information.

Self-serving bias is the tendency to claim more responsibility for successes than failures. It may also manifest itself as a tendency for people to evaluate ambiguous information in a way beneficial to their interests.

Status quo bias – the tendency for people to like things to stay relatively the same.

Von Restorff effect – the tendency for an item that “stands out like a sore thumb” to be more likely to be remembered than other items.

Zero-risk bias – preference for reducing a small risk to zero over a greater reduction in a larger risk.

A scotoma is a mental activity in which one locks on to one idea and excludes all others – known as a “lock on – lock out” program. It’s my mind’s way of avoiding overwhelm, when faced with too many choices, by protecting what I wish to maintain as my truth. However, a scotoma can get me into trouble, without me knowing about it.

A great example is in a Spongebob Squarepants cartoon. Spongebob wakes one morning and thinks he’ll create a fantastic dessert for himself. Unfortunately, his choice of ingredients cause him to have horrific halitosis (bad breath). He goes outside after breakfast, where he meets several people, all of whom scream and run away from him as soon as he opens his mouth and says, “Hello.”

His conclusion – “I must be terribly ugly!” Stuck (scotoma) in this erroneous conclusion, he weighs all future evidence only in light of it – discounting evidence to the contrary (called mental filtering).